‘It’s the new normal’: in Kyiv’s newest book store, readers fear how Ukraine’s story will end

Anastasia Ponomarenko, a 24-year-old entrepreneur, in Kyiv’s Sens bookshop. It stands on a boulevard down which Putin planned a triumphal march. Photograph: Alessio Mamo/The Observer

There is a coffee bar, a space for ­literary events and thousands of books displayed on the ground floor and in the large brick-lined basement. Signs point customers to sections: novels, history, fan fiction and foreign literature.

Welcome to Sens, Ukraine’s biggest bookshop in the heart of Kyiv. With unlikely timing, it opened its doors last week, two years after Vladimir Putin’s full-scale invasion.